i5-2500k vs i7-2600k

So, everything I've been reading people are only talking about the i5 version of the Sandy Bridge. The price is only 20 bucks difference I think between the two? either way pretty small, is there a reason people are going for the i5 over the i7?

I think the performance gain is minimal, as the i5 is more suited towards gaming than the i7. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, as i know more about AMD platforms than intel. Basically, more bang for your buck for the i5.

Our World of Warcraft benchmark is a manual FRAPS runthrough of a lightly populated server with no other player controlled characters around. The frame rates here are higher than you'd see in a real world scenario, but the relative comparison between CPUs is accurate.

We're using WoW's high quality defaults but with weather intensity turned down all the way.

So, everything I've been reading people are only talking about the i5 version of the Sandy Bridge. The price is only 20 bucks difference I think between the two? either way pretty small, is there a reason people are going for the i5 over the i7?

Price difference is more like 200€ vs 300€. Not exactly "20 bucks".

If you're gonna use it mainly for WoW, i5 is the way to go. No arguments. i7 has its benefits though if you actually do a lot of video editing and stuff that actually benefits from the Hyper Threading. It's also safer bet for future, if you have the money. Most likely 2600K will be slightly more overclockable too.

The way I see it, go for i5 if you're short on cash and don't do heavy video editing / compressing etc. Go i7 if you got the cash for it and want a safer investment for future too.

So, everything I've been reading people are only talking about the i5 version of the Sandy Bridge. The price is only 20 bucks difference I think between the two? either way pretty small, is there a reason people are going for the i5 over the i7?

Price difference is $100, and it's the same old "i5-760 vs i7-930" all over again. 2600K has hyper threading which does nothing for games and is closer to old i7's while 2500K does not have HT and is equal to old i5.

Never going to log into this garbage forum again as long as calling obvious troll obvious troll is the easiest way to get banned.
Trolling should be.

Price difference is $100, and it's the same old "i5-760 vs i7-930" all over again. 2600K has hyper threading which does nothing for games and is closer to old i7's while 2500K does not have HT and is equal to old i5.

Correct, apart from that I'd like to change i7-930 to i7-870, as it's more of a replacement to that. In the benchmarks it seems to be the same relation 2500 <-> 2600 as 870 <-> 760 as well.

Hm, not sure why I thought they were much closer in price. That certainly helps clear things up. heh.

---------- Post added 2011-01-05 at 08:27 AM ----------

I guess another question I have then is what does hyperthreading do then? If it has no effect on gaming what does it effect? The only articles I could find in a quick search were 4+ years old and basically just said ht> no ht period. If someone has a good link I'd be more than happy to read it on my own I just didn't have much luck

I guess another question I have then is what does hyperthreading do then? If it has no effect on gaming what does it effect?

Hyperthreading creates two threads per core. It essentially gives a quad core CPU 8 virtual cores. This doesn't do much for gaming, as there are a very minimal amount of games that are that multithreaded. It would help on things like video processing or sound editing, where jobs can be split into tiny pieces and spread among many cores.

Basically HT > No HT, Cores > HT. I have seen several benchmarks where AMD hex cores beat I7 processors (only in heavily threaded apps) in spite of intel having a superior architecture.

HT (IMO) is really a gimmick in most cases. It can help, but it's a feature that either should have died with the Pentium 4, or something intel shouldn't really be charging a $100+ premium for (Sort of like Intel-VT). You would be surprised how many people buy i7's and think they are getting a full blown 8 core cpu.